An infamous scene in Bureaucracy was when you had to order some food in a diner, and you'd spend 10 minutes on that (How do you want the burger, rare, medium, or well done? With fries or onion rings? Small, medium, or large? Coke or Fanta? Regular or light? etc. etc., really drawn out), and then the waiter comes back and explains that the computer crashed and you had to go through the whole tedious process again...

Come to think of it, why did we put up with it?? :-)

There was a similar scene in Leather Goddesses of Phobos (think Leisure Suit Larry on an alien planet, in text form):

You're on a barge in a river, and in the distance is something that "looks like a giant naked lady, breasts pointing to the sky".

So you sail down the river towards it, and it gets bigger and bigger over the next ten pages.

And then the river turns, and it fades away, but is still there. So you keep sailing.

"Getting bigger. You must be getting closer now". You keep sailing.

"Sunlight is gleaming on the statue, and it feels so close you could touch it". You keep sailing.

"You turn around another bend in a river, and there's... nothing there. You look around. Nothing. It was all a mirage. And the barge can't go any further."

So you sail all the way back...

Sounds like a recent experience I had trying to book tickets to a Disneyland park online: Registration, email confirmation, multiple options and numerous validation pain points for it to report their payment system was offline at the end.

The game at least was intentional rather than incompetent.

Sounds like every customer experience at Subway or Chipotle or Blaze Pizza, except for the computer crashing at the end.